Complexity:a big idea for education?

Our world is full of complex causality; causal loops and spirals, events with multiple contributing causes, chaotic oscillations in the weather, the stock market, the ecology. Understanding complex causal systems is fundamental to navigating the contemporary world, yet complex causality gets no more than an occasional nod under the label of systems thinking ...

... Awakening learners to these more complex patterns is half the battle. The other half concerns how easily we can overlook what’s going on. Drawn to salient events, we may, for instance, never ask what keeps systems constant, miss problematic patterns that play out only now and again, and neglect possible causal influences far away in time and space.” (Perkins 2014)

This article describes a cognitive approach, in the tradition of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education. It links to GUTS (Growing Up Thinking Scientifically: www. projectguts.org) an outreach that is exploring how to do this in practice.

The following concepts are central to knowledge of the characteristics of complex systems and how they behave:

• The whole is more than the sum of its parts.

• The greater the diversity (heterogeneity) of the different parts in a system, the more resilient it is likely to be.

• Systems evolve dynamically over time, self-organise and their global properties are said to be emergent.

• Change is non-linear and properties are emergent, so small consequences can have large effects that might not have been anticipated or predicted.

• There are constant interactions between any system and its surrounding environment so the boundaries of a system are typically ‘fuzzy’ – it is said to be open.

• Understanding the dynamics of networks and their topologies becomes essential for many social and natural sciences.

• Uncertainty: some things are knowable, but others are irreducibly uncertain. Embracing uncertainty and dealing with ambiguity become essential skills.